Ducks on the River, a painting by (below ) Vanessa Mirza

It was in the middle of a four-year course in choreography at Taipei National University of the Arts that Vanessa Maria Mirza had her first brush with painting. That was the summer of 2010 and she was interacting with Czech exchange students preparing for an art exhibition at the university.

Vanessa’s only experience in painting had been for school work till she chanced upon the realisation that art “was in my genes”.

“I suddenly wanted to paint,” said the 29-year-old artist who is showing her works at Reflections, a solo exhibition in the Promenade Lounge of Taj Bengal till Sunday. “At the university, I would keep painting and gifting people, I had so many of them.”

The paintings at the exhibition are based on her life in Taiwan. “The impressions of nature or people that hit me there... it is an abstraction of that,” said Vanessa who has a bachelor’s degree in business administration (marketing) from St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta.

One of the paintings, Night Whispers, is an impression of the artist “in a balcony in Taiwan and talking to friends”. The acrylic in canvas works are priced at Rs 3,000 to Rs 75,000. Visitors can also catch her painting live at the exhibition, which has a collection of 29 recent paintings made over a period of six months.

At the end of her course, Vanessa used seven of her paintings to choreograph a dance item. “It was a 40 minute production and I had used images from my paintings as a choreographic map,” said Vanessa, who has been carrying on her choreography along with art.